Pokémon Go has been around since July 2016, yet it remains the most popular and prevalent augmented reality smartphone game around. In that time, its continued popularity owes much to a steady stream of updates and events that have retained the inte...

There is a campaign to record all the SY23 postboxes since the LBSG records can sometimes be unreliable. An October opportunity gave a bike-borne chance to pinpoint some of the remoter instances up toward Cwmsymlog, but the highlight was without doubt...

I was recently invited to photograph an extra care trip out with Bramley Elderly Action, to Bridlington. It was a mild day, with gentle strolls by the seaside and some fun at the arcades. We had traditional fish and chips, and stopped by one of the man...

Sometimes determination is a pain in hindsight It’s been almost a year since we last ventured into the Yorkshire countryside as Leeds Photography Excursions. In that year my health has deteriorated, causing me to have fatigue and reduced mobility...

Hands Across the City Sunday 29th OctoberCastle Park by the Bristol Bridge entrance, BS1 3XDTime 12:30 – 16:00The culmination of the month-long celebration of Journey to Justice Bristol, this historical walk starts at Bristol Bridge. It proceeds to Pero’s Bridge where we shall hold hands to make a human bridge affirming the city’s solidarity with refugees, asylum seekers and migrant communities. We shall end at City Hall with a celebration event. Everyone is encourag [...]

by Rosamund Cran What does it mean to document a walk and what can arise from this process? To make a record, to record, to remember, to… Read more "Walking Forwards & Backwards"

Monday 17/10/2016  8°C, light wind 2m/s, overcast, low fog. Sunrise 10:49 - Sunset 16:34 Early morning we take leave ofPyramiden. In dark grey green sea ruffled by a light wind, I watch the glimmer of dawn appear over mountain tops, the moon still hanging above us. I stand on deck watching mountains and glaciers passing, and the last time most of us will pass this way for a while. We are all subdued. A few hours later we sail into Longyearbyen and moor up. 78°13.7´N, 015°36.3´E; we’re back and it’s the end of the expedition.After the chaos of packing and disembarking, pulling luggage back up the steps of the hostel, I retire to the peace and warmth of the Miner’s Bar for a cup of hot chocolate topped with cream. So we are back in civilization; people and cars and shops, even if it looks far more insubstantial than brick-built Pyramiden. In two weeks time the sunlight will disappear and there will be darkness here for the next few months. Even now the sun doesn't clear the tops of the surrounding mountains, and the amount of daylight is less and less each day. Back outside I walk to the top of town with my kite (ever hopeful), to where the road disappears into wildness and polar bear territory. There’s a suggestion of wind so I find a relatively flat space amongst the rocks and lay out the strings, untangling them, which takes a while. Turning on my GoPro I walk back and launch it into the air; a few seconds later it falls to the ground, the wind has gone. Frustration, my verbal responses disappear into the ether; fortunately there’s no-one around. I try again but by now the strings are stuck to the permafrost ground and snag on rocks. I give up; it's really not going to happen. I think that maybe I should have gone with the helium balloon idea. Too late now. A drone would have been even easier - but where's the challenge in that? Instead I wander down town and visit the local art gallery to discover a selection of old maps of the Arctic, complete with illustrations of past activites and creatures to be found in the waters of Svalbard.An old book jacket shows the preconceptions that most people held of the region - as a bleak, dangerous, inhospitable terrain of ice and rock - the borders of the known world. -->It’s trying to snow/rain. Everyone is remarking that it is far too warm for this time of year. Where is the snow? In the night the snow comes.Tuesday October 18th Climbing high. Making our way over boulders and loose rocks, pools of ice and snow, we head up into a blanket of white. We are climbing the mountain at the far end of town. A steep gully on one side falling into a snow-covered glacier at the bottom; I glimpse a glimmer of blue ice at the edges, a monochrome landscape rising and disappearing in front of us. Strips of brown-black and white, small peaks rise out of mist, smooth white slopes and edges, and lots of snow. I dare not look down, keeping my balance more by luck than skill. Ahead Sarah, her rifle at the ready (just in case), keeps up a fast pace; we follow in single file. Sarah Gerats, our guide, and Nemo, surveying from the topReaching the cairn at the summit level with the tops of mountains, we stand surveying a world of whiteness. The air feels wonderfully pure and cold. Below us Longyearbyen is a map of textures and lines.It's as though I’m in the midst of an abstract drawing - how can I compete on paper?Summit posingLater in the dark we gather together under a street-light and take turns to read a few lines of prose/poetry. I read:‘There is hardly anything that shows the short-sightedness or capriciousness of the imagination more than traveling does. … We measure the universe by ourselves… We remember an infinity of things and place…  Out there we can experience the new, even if such knowing means only to touch at nature’s vast strangeness’   (taken from Henry David Thoreau, ‘Redemptive Imagination’ – on Walking, written in mid 1850’s).Walking…  thinking… drawing… erasing… overdrawing… pausing…erasing… pausing… time  slipping… remembering  space… silenceHere is a link to the poetry reading held in Longyearbyen, 78 degrees north, October 2016 organised by Ersi Sotiropoulos as a part of the World Poetry Movement's Global Action:https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=9&v=lghwVlimvd4 In his introduction to ‘The Idea of North’, Glen Gould, a Canadian artist, writes:“Something really does happen to most people who go into the north—they become at least aware of the creative opportunity which the physical fact of the country represents and - quite often, I think - come to measure their own work and life against that rather staggering creative possibility: they become, in effect, philosophers".   Postscript….. Trying to absorb and grapple with all this, and then make work has been interesting –  challenging. In my studio I have the mass of drawings and paintings I made whilst traveling. Some of the things I attempted to do didn’t come off - like all those early attempts to fly in the Arctic (in their case their aim was to reach the north pole) my attempts at flying a kite with a camera failed - it was either too windy or no wind or it was raining or snowing or there were Walruses, or the strings stuck to the permafrost…  Using ice with frozen watercolour pigments sort-of worked; what I produced was ephemeral and that’s okay since it was all experimental and will feed future work. --> but perhaps also partly relates to Arctic melting. The impact of the landscape, its sheer scale was pretty  - to employ a word that the Americans used a lot – awesome! And it was certainly immersive.    How to convey all this in a moment on a piece of paper I’m still trying to figure it out. I can still feel the frustration of trying to draw a series of peaks with the mist moving over them - to get at least something down on the paper. In my notes I wrote ‘I can’t put down what I’m seeing… it seems quite insane to be trying’. My notes are full of colour descriptions… ‘white isn’t white, white is many whites’… Work will emerge in the coming year, so watch this space…Thank you all for your support 

#Thread and Word : A walking poem written during the Art Festival XOXO @OXO #Tribe17   we walked and experienced our surroundings  with a pack of instructional cards, ropes and ribbons. These are the words that resulted from th...

A walk with Tisidra Jones – September, 2017 We wander in our past         walking as a part of history         walking in the unknown present space that belonged to neither of us mind in and out of place and absence        noticing a purple house   […]

Sunday 16/10/2016  -2°C, 5m/s. Sunrise 10:39 - Sunset 16:45.Late Saturday night we arrive and anchor close to Pyramiden 78°39.2´N, 16°22.9´E.Emerging onto an icy deck in crisp blue morning light, the moon still hangs over a now completely calm sea. In front of us the abandoned Russian settlement of Pyramiden sits silently at the foot of the snow-capped Pyramid Mountain. Once a model coal mining town until the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, it still bears the scars of its mining days. In 1936, the Soviets acquired the rights to use the coalfields at Pyramiden and built the town to demonstrate Soviet power.Lenin's viewThe Russian government threw money at this place, even importing earth from the Ukraine so there would be grassy areas on top of the permafrost. Once there were green houses full of vegetables, hens laying eggs. A place where only the best coal miners and their families could work.It was desirable to live here - life was relaxed away from Mother Russia, people  had more freedom. Any foreigner could come here without a visa, and it must of been impressive.In the 1980s more than 1,000 people lived in Pyramiden. Residents were assigned to different residential halls, which acquired their own nicknames -  London for single men, Paris for the unmarried women  (there was even pub on the ground floor of the women's building). Crazy House for families , so called because the children who would always play in the hallways. Gostinka (Russian for “hotel,”) was built to house short-term workers. There was a hospital, a large cafeteria - apparently so that the women didn't have to cook for their families and therefore could be useful workers (!) - a giant mosaic was made depicting the Svalbard landscape populated by heroes of Norse legends. Apparently the heated indoor pool was the best in Svalbard. All was constructed in typical Soviet block-style fashion of brick made on site with rounded edges to lessen the impact of the bitter winter wind.  Somewhere there is even a grave yard for both humans and cats.Now blocks of abandoned flats where mine workers and their families once lived, are now colonised by kittiwakes. It''s difficult to imagine this waste land full of industry; I try to imagine families wandering the boardwalks on a summer evening.  At top of town in front of the Culture House the northern-most bust of Lenin surveys empty streets and dilapidated buildings. We wander around the Culture house; inside is full of abandoned items - sets of old skis, a football lies in the sports court, the empty goals still in place - when was the last game? Russian books and pamphlets, old photographs of people who once lived and worked here. The world's northern-most grand piano - a "Red October" - sits on the stage in the dark and deserted auditorium. Jordi mounts the stars, sits and plays, the out-of-tune sound echoing eerily through the building. On the wall in a room upstairs is a panorama depicting the surrounding mountains. Who painted it? Rotting wooden walkways and bridges, huge mounds of scrap metal lie beside the dock juxtaposed with bright soviet monuments that reach for the sky proclaiming power. Its a pretty horrible mess but the setting surrounded by snow capped mountains, the Nordenskiöld glacier and fjord to the east, is magnificent. Waking to this everyday as you went to work - would you ever get used to it? But then the mine workers would spend their days in darkness, deep inside the mountain, to emerge into either the darkness of a polar night or blinking into the brilliant light of the summer season. Rusting swings sit in the playgroundWith the fall of the Soviet Union the money dried up, wages stopped being paid, there were shortages and standard of living fell, so families left. The town was abandonded. On March 31,1998, the last coal was extracted from the mine; seven months later, just before the ice arrived, on October 10th the last residents left. Pyramiden has now become, or they are attempting to make it, a tourist destination with a hotel staffed by a couple of Russians where visitors can enjoy staying in a Russian style room or opt for more European comforts.The Hotel - Russian style Before we leave to get back for dinner I make a quick drawing of the Pyramide mountain rubbing chalk and graphite across the page smudged with the icy water running from the mountain. Not really enough time to do much before we return to the boat. Just beyond me on the path Jordi is filming Spike dressed as a polar bear and sweeping snow. Drawing the mountain, photo courtesy of Jordi ForniesThe Pyramiden mountain, photo courtesy of Jordi ForniesLater we troop along the board walks and return in the dark to the hotel and sit in the bar drinking vodka infused with horseradish and then another with ginger (both are pretty good), watching videos of folk dancing Russians bands. I find the contrast between all this and the surrounding landscape bizarre and also depressing. Must be very weird for the few remaining caretakers who live there all year in the midst of such decay, particularly during the dark months of Polar Night. The Arctic has a complicated history of exploitation - exploitation of natural resources. Its animals have been fished and hunted to virtual extinction, it’s been mined, claimed, land stolen, people destroyed by disease, and of course now there are global warming issues – the threat of ecological destruction of the planet. When I was interviewed by the anthropologist on board we talked about the north and I found myself relating these places to the wall in the series Game of Thrones holding back the Wildling hoards of the icy north who are threatening to invade and, like Janssen’s Groke, bring winter to the rest of the world. I feel that Longyearbyen and Ny Ålesund are like walls but doing the opposite to that in the Games of Thrones - or maybe not quite the opposite - instead are trying to protect the north, to prevent the world from invading the Arctic, guarding, drawing attention to its fragility – holding us back from inflicting more human exploitation and destruction.

The performance tour Hyper-Heritage, first performed back in April 2017 for the Saving the Past for the Future Festival at JCCAC, will be making a return outing. The dates will be December 2nd and 3rd. Expect an updated and augmented jou...

Following the success of this past summer's Way-Losing tours, there are plans for something bigger and bolder next year. This is one for the intrepid!The dates have not been fixed yet but in the Summer of 2018 there will be a three-day Way-Losing ...

Friday the 13th derive... please meet us tomorrow 6pm outside urbis / the football museum for a wander. All welcome, and as always the walk will be a free, autonomous and self determined drift, provocing new ways to feel the city. Hope to see you there...

On Saturday 7th October, I led a walk as part of the Love Arts Festival 2017 programme. The ‘Art, Access and Urban Walking’ grew out of the walk I led as part of Jane’s Walk Leeds in May. The idea was to create conversation around acc...

ONE: DISCOVERY An invitation to participate in a seminar held by the Oral History Society in September 2017, based on some work from thirteen or so years before, got me thinking about oral history and differing walking practices. Obviously, many peopl...

Alan Nakagawa is a force of creative nature. This conversation took place on July 1, 2012 at the now defunct Mi Ranchito restaurant on Washington Blvd (just off Grand View) in Mar Vista, California. Originally part of my earlier Atlas Sets project, the conversation feels right at home under the umbrella of Imprintable…stay tuned for […]

I am pleased to announce Imprintable, a new project of interviews and discussions with artists, poets, composers, educators, and other creative citizens about the work we do, where we do it, and how it shapes our symbiotic relationship to the landscape. Imprintable absorbs existing interviews from the Atlas Place and Atlas Sets projects in an […]

I was invited by artist and good friend Manling Cheung, to participate in the exhibition 'One's origin' at the Jao Tsung-I Academy, near to Mei Foo, and decided to present the current status of my ongoing performance work 'No holiday'.The group show fe...

Wednesday 29 November 2017 – October 2020: First meeting of International Metropolitan Trail Association. Part of opening Trail Designers Exhibition […]

Richardson: Wells and Springs of Gloucestershire, HMSO,1930 Introduction: “Between Dursley and Dudbridge few springs issue; some of the more reliable are used for the supply of Coaley and King’s Stanley…” “In the Nailsworth, Horsley and...